A Pirate's Life: Forged by the Sea
by SylverSpyder
Summary: Will Turner, AU backstory, involves swords and violence. Warnings for said violence and language as well as oddly applied syntax. Also, I don't own Pirates of the Caribbean. I just had a spare hour and found an old account password.


I was floating face up, the sun searing into my eyes so that even the blue of the sea was lost to the glare. Specks of salt had dried on my face, my lips. Squinting cracked the chapped, burned skin as I glared at the sky above me. My hands had gone numb hours ago. I was trapped in my head, waiting to drown but incapable of turning and breathing in the bitter ocean.

The ship had gone down two nights ago, the olive oil transported in her split hull soaked the rigging and brought the squalls to flame when the lightning struck. Nine years old, I was the youngest ships-boy aboard. Apprenticeship with the blacksmith had ended when he found a family willing to pay for the position- and I was left walking the docks and stealing food left to the birds. Within a month, I was near-starved. Within another I was ready to do anything to survive. Anything.

The Captain of the Merriweather did not take me on as a favor, though. The flag of a ship means nothing in these times. Merchants are as bloodthirsty a lot as the pirates they blaspheme, and neither makes an honest dollar.

But I could not complain.

The death of the last boy on this ship left a hole in the roster, a commonplace situation. Raw hands, vicious hours, and sailors' spite kill our lot more often than not. I was the first candidate to meet the plank when the rigging was tied and the anchor had fallen at Port Royal.

Now I was just another dead ships-boy without a ship or a coin to pay off Davy Jones.

It was the second time I had been left for dead, the first time was when Eli- _A mosquito landed on my lip and the sensitive nerve endings fired relentlessly, my brain overloading with the sensation of the bite _zabeth found me and I ended up in Port Royal.

I could forge a better weapon than some blacksmiths, in the dead of the night I had memorized the navigation charts, and back home there was- _she_ was there. I was supposed to be something- someone.

Now I realized something.

No one would care that I was dead. There was a girl once, but…

Soon she would be a girl no longer. We were both forced to grow up.

The memories of fingers that the ocean made cold and bloated danced over my skin. I was a ships-boy, a nothing. A whipping post. The one sent to the crow's nest in a storm, tied to the mizzenmast when the shipmates needed a laugh. Blistered and bleeding and pissing in the wind because I had spent three days straight manning the watch and I couldnae even slip and stumble down to the side of the deck or find a bucket.

Now the waves rose up and down in a familiar way and I realized how small I was. A ships-boy, a speck of nothing in the wide ocean, a bastard child of the land and the sea.

My father was a sailor. He died here, too.

My mother- she lost me years ago. Or I lost her. She was nothing more than a vague memory, an afterthought when I was about to fall asleep and the ocean seemed to hum a familiar lullaby. Those were the moments when I remembered someone holding me- it was not too long ago, but life is an eternity. I guess it figures mine would be both. Short and long. Brief but unending.

The insect paced an uneven row down my lip, landing on my swollen tongue and I found myself picturing what I looked like, a bloated corpse scraping the surface of the waves with an expressionless face- mouth barely sucking in automatic breaths and chest still. Mosquitoes and other creatures would ravage my cadaver as it lay preserved by the roll of the waves.

Sand scraped the heels of my feet, barely registering as the dehydration drove me mad.

Sand, mosquitoes, the fingers of long-dead men.

I squinted my eyes open again, feeling the skin break at the movement and sure I was too far gone to bleed.

A weathered face loomed over me, blocking out the waters' glow.

"Well damn the seas if it ain't alive!"

And it was a thrice damned, twice hanged pirate. Laughter rang in my ears, but it wasn't his, and it wasn't mine.

"And I bet a pence he's a Spaniard's runt."

I was gone.

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._

_We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot._

_Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho._

_We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot._

_Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho._

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._

Eleven years old and seven sheets to the wind, or however many sheets I felt like hoistin', which wasn't much anyways, I stood on the aft railing and contemplated the murky waters of the dock. If I fell there was every chance I would hit one of the pilings and drown. I looked at the blood on my hands and danced on the rail to my eerie tune, daring life to send me spinning to the depths. Please God, let me fall. I continued my jig and though the rail creaked, my footing never faltered.

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._

_We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot._

_Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho._

_We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot._

_Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho._

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._

"I lost me lass to a Spaniard's ass,

Aye and to my cutlass he lost an eye!

We managed our way through Deception Pass

An' young Will here refuses to die.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!

Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho!"

I snorted up rum at the unconventional rewording as Samuels split the side of his mug on the table's edge.

"Gimme an' the lad here some more of this rotty swash you been callin' rum, wench!" He swatted the back of a pinned up lady I was pretty sure wasn't of any relation to the barkeep or the establishment.

I sighed. "What are ye doin' in this part of the world, Sam? I haven't seen you since we parted ways when I was twelve and you paid my way with the local smithy."

"Just checkin' on you," he belched out. "You're too proper an' always have been. I've been hoping you'd have learned to act like a damned Scotsman by now."

People continued to flow in and out of the local brewery as he listed towards the outer edge of the table. He was dead drunk nine pints in.

"I spent two years there, not a century! Besides, you're a goddamned pirate Captain; Sir, letting me live was the most ridiculous caper you've been up to since that rubbish at Deception Pass!" The easy speech felt natural, like the slide of a rough deck beneath my feet as we jibed or the burn of hot sparks on my chest.

Samuels turned unexpectedly somber, "You need to find a home somewhere, Will. You're the best smithy I've ever seen, a bloomin' spectacular sailor, and as bright as any Spanish-English bastard could be, but a bloody awful pirate," he slurred out. "And- to think of it, you could grow a head or two more…" he added smarmily, shaking off sentiment.

"Tell that to the world," I groaned. "There isn't anyone who'd agree with you. I'm nothin' and I don't belong here."

I looked down at my arms and the speckled burn scars that littered them, remembering the salt and the water and the heaving breaths, burning lungful's of air.

"I'm not a Scotsman, our time in Spain taught me que aún sí soy de España- nunca ellos me necesitan, and there's no place for me here in England, the sea's for merchants and pirates, and not a goddamn forge. The French are a mess but je m'en fou. I need a home, even if I have to go back to Guangdong. ¡Maldición! That forge is the only place I'm any good and this town's already got two working blacksmiths. I'll have finished my apprenticeship in a week- I'll be a journeyman and I have no place to go…"

"There is one place I heard they were in need of a smith, or at least an assistant…" Samuels ground out edgily.

"Where?" I raised my eyebrows testily, kicking his foot beneath the table when he appeared to doze off.

"Port Royal."

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._

_We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot._

_Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho._

_We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot._

_Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho._

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._

I sang to myself as I worked; John Brown was unconscious in his own vomit in the corner- and after two years back, I knew better than to try to wake him. Instead I studied and worked in the heat of the flames, the gentle clamor of Port Royal outside the shop a lullaby to the tune. The last two years had been the easiest of my life. And Elizabeth. She was perfect. Lovelier than I remembered and so blissfully unaware of my recent past…

I had renounced it all, stopped looking for familiar flags in the port and stopped speaking when foreign sailors called for a drink. I was alone, but that was okay. I'd never really stood out anyways.

Shifting the anvil to place the bick and horn at proper angles, I put my full weight and attention into my current piece, a sword to be my crowning glory, commissioned by the governor.

"I left my heart on the Seven Seas,

My soul to Davy Jones,

All I've got left for my lovin' gal,

Is this weathered pile o' bones.

Give me a blade, a sword in my hand,

An' I'll fight to the end of my days,

But give me some rum and a one night stand,

And that, son, will get you a raise!"

I bellowed as I fed the flames, reheating and folding the metal piece to compose the ridge of the fuller as it gently sloped into the blade. They were to counterbalance the simple but carefully crafted guard, grip and pommel I had been shaping and planning for over a month.

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._

_We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot._

_Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho._

_We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot._

_Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho._

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._

The sword came along beautifully. Had I known who would later use it I might have said casse-toi to the order, but that was then. And now I was pretending I'd never used a sword, fighting a pirate I might once have befriended, and watching Commodore Norrington stare into Elizabeth's eyes.

"I dreamt about you last night," she had said.

And he held her hostage.

"You're the one they're hunting. The pirate," I wondered at the tight, vicious quality to my voice, remembering the sound of screams as a ship was ransacked. _We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot._

The pirate- Jack- acknowledged me with a tip of his head ... then frowned, regarding me.

I remembered then that I was a freak, a pacifist born of violence, regurgitated twice from the mouth of Davy Jones' Locker, and caught between the love of fire and water.

"You look familiar," he proclaimed, and I felt my throat tighten. "Have I ever threatened you before?"

"I've made a point of avoiding familiarity with pirates."

I could never trust anyone aboard the ship. Even Samuels, I had always been certain, had his own agenda. He used to conform it, smiling mysteriously, "I owed a man and you seemed fit to bear my debt fulfilled."

"Ah. Then it would be a shame to put a black mark on your record. So if you'll excuse me ..." The pirate said with a certain carelessness that was unfamiliar, almost painful.

A man tried to force me to his berth when I was eleven and we took to port in China. I killed him with a shattered gin bottle. I had never felt clean since, the blood too thick on my hands. He was one black mark on my record. Then there were the victims I couldn't save, the ones I had pretended to forget the entire time since returning to Port Royal. My record was a black mark, stretched out over a series of unending years.

Pirates and traders and everyday people, they were all hiding stained records.

I remembered the metal prosthetic leg I had improvised in Tortuga for the one-legged prostitute with her dirty face set apart from her unexpectedly mannered voice. I thought of the bullet hole in my thigh, two inches from an untimely death, the water in my lungs, the screeching of motherless urchins in Luxembourg.

Beside the door was a grindstone, a sword resting in the honing guide. Before the pirate could react, I had it in hand.

"Do you think this is wise, boy? Crossing blades with a pirate?" If he only knew.

"You threatened Miss Swann," I declared, my voice level.

"Only a little," he acquiesced.

I wasn't home anywhere, so maybe I shouldn't stay anywhere. I could note one thing- the blade was at home in my hand, all at once a guided force.

Fire or water? Forge or sea? I felt again as though I was floating face up, the sun searing into my eyes so that even the blue of the sea was lost to the glare.

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._

I assumed an en garde position, and there was a look of realization in the pirate's eyes; I realized he SAW me. The scar across my chest from the attack that brought me to Port Royal the first time stung_. _

Maybe I hadn't been invisible. Maybe I had been hiding.

The pirate attacked me and I smiled as I parried. Maybe not. Maybe I had no idea who I was.

But I could sail, I could fight, I could design things no one else dared, and I could live a life like no other.

Well, bok, as the Turkish say.

As we fought, I hummed.

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._

_We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot._

_Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho._

_We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot._

_Drink up, me hearties, Yo ho._

_Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me._


End file.
